A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico

By Pablo Piccato

A History of Infamy explores the broken nexus between crime, justice, and truth in mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Faced with the violence and impunity that defined politics, policing, and the judicial system in post-revolutionary times, Mexicans sought truth and justice outside state institutions. During this period, criminal news and crime fiction flourished. Civil society’s search for truth and justice led, paradoxically, to the normalization of extrajudicial violence and neglect of the rights of victims. As Pablo Piccato demonstrates, ordinary people in Mexico have made crime and punishment central concerns of the public sphere during the last century, and in doing so have shaped crime and violence in our times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9780520966079

Pablo Piccato

Pablo Piccato is associate professor of history at Columbia University. He is the author of City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931.

Book preview

A History of Infamy

VIOLENCE IN LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

Edited by Pablo Piccato, Federico Finchelstein, and Paul Gillingham

1. Uruguay, 1968: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktails, by Vania Markarian

2. While the City Sleeps: A History of Pistoleros, Policemen, and the Crime Beat in Buenos Aires before Perón, by Lila Caimari

3. Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia, by Robert A. Karl

4. A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico, by Pablo Piccato

A History of Infamy

CRIME, TRUTH, AND JUSTICE IN MEXICO

Pablo Piccato

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by Pablo Piccato

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Piccato, Pablo, author.

Title: A history of infamy : crime, truth, and justice in Mexico / Pablo Piccato.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016042800 (print) | LCCN 2016043730 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520292611 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520292628 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520966079 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Crime—Mexico—History—20th century. | Crime—Press coverage—Mexico—History—20th century. | Crime writing—History and criticism. | Justice, Administration of—Mexico—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HV6813.5 .P53 2017 (print) | LCC HV6813.5 (ebook) | DDC 364.97209/045--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042800

Manufactured in the United States of America

26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

para Xóchitl, Catalina y Aída

Soñé con detectives helados, detectives latinoamericanos

que intentaban mantener los ojos abiertos

en medio del sueño.

Soñé con crímenes horribles

Y con tipos cuidadosos

que procuraban no pisar los charcos de sangre

y al mismo tiempo abarcar con una sola mirada

el escenario del crimen.

Soñé con detectives perdidos

en el espejo convexo de los Arnolfini:

nuestra época, nuestras perspectivas,

nuestros modelos del Espanto.

ROBERTO BOLAÑO,

La Universidad Desconocida

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A National History of Infamy

PART ONE: SPACES

1 • From Transparency to Darkness: Justice and Publicity in the Mirror of Criminal Juries

2 • A Look at the Crime Scene: The Nota Roja and the Public Pursuit of Truth

PART TWO: ACTORS

3 • Lost Detectives: Policemen, Torture, Ley Fuga

4 • Horrible Crimes: Murderers as Authors

5 • Careful Guys: Pistoleros and the Business of Politics

PART THREE: FICTIONS

6 • Our Times, Our Perspectives: The Emergence of Mexican Crime Fiction

7 • Our Models of Dread: Crime as Revenge, Justice, and Art

Conclusion: Trying to Keep Our Eyes Open

Appendix: Quantitative Evidence about Crime in Mexico in the Last Century

Abbreviations for Archival Sources

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If I had not witnessed the exemplary rigor, hard work, and long hours that my daughters Catalina and Aída put into their high school and college study, I would probably have taken many more years to write this book. As it is, their love for knowledge made me realize that it was worth joining them in more than a few sleepless nights to produce something that one day might be of interest to other students. All of this, of course, was possible because Xóchitl Medina, my wife, a teachers’ teacher, taught us how to work hard and do things well. My conversations with the three of them about the stories in this book helped me improve it and see its relevance. Whether written close to or far away from them, every line that follows is owed to them.

I probably started this book, without knowing it, the first day of class at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in 1983. While I waited for a teacher to show up, I read André Gide’s tale of the mysterious case of a woman who had been locked in a dark room for twenty-five years; my sister had given me the book for my birthday. Thirty-two years later later I came across a quote from the same book in Sara Maza’s Violette Nozière: The more we know of the circumstances, the deeper the mystery becomes, taking leave of the facts to settle in the personalities.* The coincidence speaks much about the reasons why I studied and wrote history in the intervening years, but also about the debts I have incurred in the meanwhile. The thirst to read broadly, but always returning to Jorge Luis Borges, I owe to my family, including my sister Cecilia, my brother Antonio, my mother Ana, and my late father Miguel Angel. I read Maza’s book because Kate Marshall, the University of California Press editor, sent it to me, as part of the guidance and impulse she gave to this project. I am also thankful for the work of Luis Herrán, Bradley Depew, Francisco Reinking, and Sue Carter. My collaboration with the coeditors of the series on the history of violence in Latina America to which this book belongs, Paul Gillingham and Federico Finchelstein, has also been an invaluable factor. Paul has been a source of energy and knowledge. His understanding of twentieth-century Mexico helped me sharpen my argument and place it in the right context. Federico was also central in the drive to finish this project, but also for my effort to conceptualize violence and politics. I am much obliged for their reading of the manuscript, which brought out ideas that had not been well formulated initially. My debt to the readers for the University of California Press is very deep: Mary Kay Vaughan, Elaine Carey, and Robert Buffington improved this book in decisive ways. Rob has read my last three books, so my gratitude to him is especially deep. Adela Pineda, Thomas Rath, and Benjamin T. Smith were extremely generous in reading, commenting on, and enhancing the manuscript. Ben’s generous erudition has enriched this book, which I can only hope will establish a dialogue with his forthcoming work on crime and the press.

Acknowledging the help of many people in the production of this book is not a chore but a way to remember many good conversations and collaborations. First among them are those with my colleagues and friends Caterina Pizzigoni, Nara Milanich, and Amy Chazkel, who gave insightful first readings to these chapters. Decisive encouragement, questions, and suggestions came from Claudia Agostoni, Marianne Braig, Lila Caimari, Gabriela Cano, Hélène Combes, Angélica Durán Martínez, Tanya Filer, Gustavo Fondevila, Cathy Fourez, Serge Gruzinski, Ruth Halvey, Paul Hathazy, Aída Hernández, Marc Hertzman, Eric A. Johnson, Ryan Jones, Dominique Kalifa, Alan Knight, Regnar Kristensen, Alejandra Leal, Eugenia Lean, Annick Lempérière, Everard Meade, Daniela Michel, Mariana Mora, Saydi Núñez Zetina, Nadège Ragaru, Margareth Rago, Ricardo Salvatore, Gema Santamaría, Luana Saturnino Tvardovskas, Elisa Speckman Guerra, Pieter Spierenburg, Mauricio Tenorio, Geneviève Verdo, Edward Wright-Rios, Rihan Yeh, René Zenteno, and my compadres Theo Hernández and Carla Bergés. Students at Columbia deserve a separate mention for their sustained interest and their keen commentaries on long chapter drafts: Sarah Beckhart, Andre Deckrow, Marianne González le Saux, Sara Hidalgo, Paul Katz, Daniel Kressel, Daniel Morales, Rachel Newman, Allison Powers, and Alfonso Salgado. Rachel’s collaboration was essential in the latter stages of the process, improving the manuscript and obtaining the images. I also had the invaluable assistance of Laura Rojas, who discovered María del Pilar Moreno for me, Xóchitl Murguía, Julia del Palacio, Natalia Ramírez, Kimberly Traube, and María Zamorano. I thank Susan Flaherty and Rodrigo Moya for their help in obtaining the image on the cover, Carlos Peláez Fuentes and Luis Francisco Macías, from La Prensa, and Marina Vázquez Ramos from the Fototeca, Hemeroteca y Biblioteca Mario Vázquez Raña.

I received financial and institutional support from Columbia University through the Institute of Latin American Studies, the Department of History, the Institute for Social Research and Policy, and the Alliance Program, which made possible a stay at the Université de Paris 1, Panthéon Sorbonne. I also had the support of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, for a useful stay in La Jolla; the Desigualdades Project at the Freie Universität Berlin, for a productive time in Berlin; the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, for another fruitful month in Sao Paulo; the American Council of Learned Societies; and the Shorin-Ores family, for some quiet time in Lakeville, Connecticut.

Introduction

A NATIONAL HISTORY OF INFAMY

Like any other history book, this one tries to understand the present. For Mexico, the present means violence and impunity of such scale that the name of the country has become virtually synonymous with infamy. Violence and impunity seem to be rooted in the dehumanization of victims, which both the government and a large sector of the public accept as inevitable. Murder is not usually investigated but rather is simply explained on the basis of disputes among victims or criminals whose rights are routinely violated. This book argues that this neglect is the product of a historical process. The political regime that emerged from the 1910 revolution was a model of stability for Latin America during the twentieth century, yet not a successful example of transition to democracy and the rule of law. Looking at national history through the lens of crime and justice, this book examines the emergence, by the middle decades of the century, of a broadly shared tolerance in Mexican civil society for extrajudicial punishment and the victimization of the innocent. This tolerance developed despite the parallel emergence of critical perspectives sharply condemning the inability of the state to seek and acknowledge the truth.

The nexus of crime, the truth, and justice is a premise of modern society: we all believe that there should be a relationship between the three. Once a crime is committed, the police must establish what happened and who is responsible, and the judiciary must follow up with an appropriate punishment. In Mexico, that premise is as old as the nation. Yet during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Mexicans came to define reality by the absence of that connection: the truth about specific crimes was often impossible to know, and as a result, justice could be achieved only occasionally, more often than not outside state institutions. From the twenties to the fifties, we also see the development of language and themes that allowed citizens to talk about the problem and keep it in a central place in public life. This book is not just about symbols or ideas, however. Even perceptions—a word commonly used today by contemporary politicians to suggest that they know more about reality than the public does—are the product of practices enacted by social actors and the state. This book traces the ways in which the crime-truth-justice nexus broke down and looks at civil society’s attempts to restore it. Preceded by a dictatorship and a civil war, the period of national history considered in this book saw the development of a coherent set of knowledges and practices around crime and justice. These basic notions survived beyond the end of this period, when new forms of organized crime and state complicity with violence overwhelmed civil society’s ability to cope with them.

The history of crime in postrevolutionary Mexico is intertwined with the country’s political history. Beginning in 1876, the Porfirian regime managed to project an image of peace over a reality of social and political violence. The government cited crime, particularly petty theft, and alcoholism, as reasons to deploy punishment as a form of social engineering. During the revolution, the legal definition of crime was almost meaningless, as collective acts of robbery, murder, and rape went unpunished, and authorities were powerless to guarantee life or property. Immediately after the civil war, the confluence of widespread access to guns, class conflict, and the government’s laxity in relation to crime broadened the gray zone for transgression.¹ A government based on a broad alliance between labor and peasant organizations, progressive intellectuals, and national capitalists consolidated in the 1920s. Starting in 1929, a unified official party system minimized electoral competition and disciplined the political class across the country, although this system hardly eliminated patronage. About the same time, new codes and other legal reforms portended a modern penal system. Yet behind the façade of corportatist stability, public life was fractious and decentralized, as diverse social actors were finding new ways to negotiate relations with the state and across class divides. While old criminal practices subsisted, modern forms of criminality emerged and became more prominent in public life.

A distinct era in the history of crime began in the late twenties, with massive urban growth in the forties. Recent studies confirm the connection between modernization and new forms of criminality, viewing crime as a symptom of new forms of urban individualism associated with capitalism, the emergence of national mass media, and U.S. cultural influence. The archetypal urban gangster—earlier associated with the U.S. side of the border—became the dominant trope of the new Mexican underworld. Those violent men of humble origin displayed their success through the highly visible consumption of expensive clothing, cars, and weapons. In this new era of the pursuit of prosperity, legality became an inconsequential, marginal component of what was seen simply as business. The moral lessons of gangsters’ stories were founded purely on the basis of personal success or failure. The criminological paradigm dominant in the late nineteenth century, which viewed the criminal as a primitive individual who was separate from the civilized world, could not account for this new expression of criminality, in which the gangsters defined success. The sharp line dividing criminal from lawful had become dulled.²

Quantitative evidence, described in the appendix, supports the idea of a distinct period between the twenties and fifties. Overall crime rates decrease nationally from the end of the revolution, around 1920, until the eighties, when property crimes begin to increase, while violent crimes continue a downward trend only reversed by the so-called war on drugs of the first decade of the twenty-first century. By the late sixties, the number of indictments for drug trafficking had increased, indicating the state’s newfound interest in these offenses. The effects of these new policies in terms of corruption and violence ushered in a new phase in the national history of crime, an unfinished era that is beyond the scope of this book. At the same time as drugs became its obsession, the federal government also revealed its propensity to use violence against political dissidents. Since the sixties, rural guerrilla, labor movements, and student protesters denounced and often responded in kind to the underlying violence of Mexican politics. Repression was most dramatically exemplified by the October 2, 1968, massacre of students in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, an emblematic episode of the dirty war against social movements in which presidents gave intelligence and armed services great leeway to use violence. The members of these branches of the state also used their enhanced power to exploit the increasingly profitable business of extortion and drug trafficking. Politics combined with social and cultural changes to transform criminal practices themselves, now typified by drug trafficking and consumption, juvenile delinquency, and some notorious examples of cops turned robbers.³

Crime was always present in Mexico, but it was not until after the revolution that it became the most prominent fact of urban life and the object of systematic investigation. Each crime left material evidence, most notably a corpse and a thick trail of testimonies, feelings, opinions, and other traces. Detection was the basic operation to reveal what had happened; in Mexico, it involved methods and skills mastered by professionals, called detectives, but regular citizens also appropriated these techniques. Professionals and civilians operated on the assumption that there was one truthful answer to the riddle posed by crime. Yet this was also the time when the link between the reality behind crime and the truthful public knowledge of its causes and penal responsibility became a problem.⁴ Institutional and political constraints limited the capacity and prestige of Mexican detectives, and they did not care much about collecting physical evidence, relying instead on their ability to deceive, threaten, and torture suspects. This opened up the task of detection to other actors. A diversity of readers and writers presented their opinions about the famous cases that seemed shrouded in mystery. This civic engagement had no parallel in other fields of public life, especially as political mobilization, electoral politics, and open debate about the regime in the public sphere were increasingly controlled by the official party and its ruling elite.

This engagement is all the more remarkable because everyone knew that the truth about a crime did not determine the punishment administered by penal institutions. Judicial processes were slow and difficult to understand. For victims and their kin, delays diminished a sense of vindication—when trials did not actually inflict more humiliation and pain. Impunity was high: in cases of murder, between 1926 and 1952, and throughout the country, only 38 percent of the indicted were found guilty, and a large percentage of investigations did not even yield an accusation.⁵ Presidential archives during these years contain thousands of letters from relatives of murder victims denouncing the impunity of killers and demanding the president’s intervention. In the case of minor crimes like theft or extortion, newspapers published abundant examples of impunity and corruption among judges and police officers. Incarceration was not necessarily related to criminal culpability. Prisoners lacked information about their status. They did know that the guilty often walked free, and the innocent often remained behind bars.

Truth, in other words, has a history and a set of local particularities. In Mexico, the middle decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of new questions that could be answered truthfully. In the past, all that was needed was to establish the facts of the crime, usually in the form of a narrative where criminals, victims, and authorities were clearly distinguished. The revolution was a time of lawlessness, when crime and politics mixed, making it more complicated to establish the truth about a crime, particularly in cases of murder. The flawed methods used by Mexican authorities turned citizens’ focus to the suspect’s own words as the most reliable version of what had really happened. As Manuel Múzquiz Blanco put it in a 1931 story published in Detective, If the judicial truth, the trial records, the imagination of reporters, the viciousness of prosecutors, and the witnesses’ accounts gave the affair the appearance of a puppet show, the simple truth, presented by the main character in the drama, Dolores Bojórquez . . . is even darker, colder, more brutal.⁶ Now, for example, it was legitimate to explore the subjectivity of the criminal with the aid of journalism, science, and even fiction. While the police and judiciary lacked the social authority to provide a credible account of events, criminals’ thoughts, feelings, and impulses were seen as a legitimate basis for public discussion. In determining the truth about crime, once-authoritative scientific methods now competed with the moving sincerity of personal accounts, particularly murderers’ confessions. Criminologists had to adapt their approach to their favorite object of study, the criminal. Although positivist ideas about born criminals as primitive human beings continued to be cited, they now shared the scene with those of psychiatrists, physicians, and psychoanalysts, who explored criminals on the assumption that they had complex personalities, and that their words could hide but also reveal the truth.

Confessions were not above criticism, of course. Relatives of murder victims could participate as the civil part in trials, or through the press, to defend the reputation of victims. Newspaper and crime fiction readers were aware of the ineptitude, corruption, and impunity of law enforcement. They learned that confessions could be obtained through coercion. Still, most people believed that the truth lay somewhere in the crime pages. The Mexican history of detection, therefore, defies the premise that the state was a known quantity in the judicial process, and that once proof was established, a guilty sentence was assured. In Mexico, multiple actors, including journalists, lawyers, jurors, witnesses, suspects, and victims, argued about what constituted the truth. The state played a part in the process but did not control it. Even writers had a difficult time restoring a sense of order through fiction. Detection, in sum, was a complex process, but not so much that people lost hope of ever reaching the truth. Their debates might not always lead to a judicial sentence, but they achieved some degree of validation in the court of public opinion.⁷

Crime was a central theme in the public sphere. It was narrated, explained, pictured, and debated by people from all walks of life. Analyzing these discussions allows us to show how crime produced representations of reality that, in turn, shaped it.⁸ Detectives, suspects, victims, witnesses, judges, journalists, and readers came together to discuss stories of crime. The evidence they summoned was variegated and confusing, unencumbered by legal criteria or even moral norms. Crime provided objective facts, independent from state-sanctioned scientific or legal knowledge. Narratives of famous cases, images of murderers and dead bodies, were as real as any fact about social life could be. Jury trials, crime news, and crime fiction gave citizens a platform for disseminating their own explanations and becoming authors of stories and narratives—some suspects were even allowed to give speeches and interviews. In these accounts, murder was an act full of meaning, something to be explained and interpreted with the use of reason and sentiment, and even judged from an aesthetic perspective.

These narratives and debates created what I term criminal literacy—basic knowledge about the world of crime and penal law. Criminal literacy included eclectic information about institutions, famous cases, everyday practices, and dangerous places that helped people navigate the complex practical problems of modern urban life. The uncertainty surrounding justice and the police only made that knowledge more necessary. The basic fact of criminal literacy in Mexico was that the truth was never definitive, but always debatable. Reality, in other words, was not the raw information one gathered by walking the streets of the city or peeking at crime scenes: it was the organization of that information into predictable patterns that made crime the object of a productive dialogue and promised the restoration of safety after a transgression.⁹

Mexico’s reputation, both within and outside the country, has long been tainted by violence and impunity. In the eyes of outsiders, the country was practically in the hands of highway robbers during the unstable years that followed independence. During the Porfiriato, prisons and city streets seemed to be infested with drunks and marijuana-fueled, knife-wielding degenerates. The 1910 revolution came with an explosion of violence and disorder on such a massive scale that images of Mexican executions and corpses were printed on postcards. By the mid-twentieth century, Mexico was a calmer place, a tolerant haven for psychoactive, erotic, or otherwise illicit entertainment for travelers. William Burroughs praised Mexico City in 1949 for the general atmosphere of freedom that violence and illegality offered. (It certainly helped him to escape punishment for the accidental shooting of his own wife.)¹⁰

This book understands infamy, to use Jorge Luis Borges’s words, as a surface of images.¹¹ Yet behind the apocryphal or distorted stories that form his 1935 Historia universal de la infamia, there is a subtle argument about the need to revisit the connections between fiction and reality, and reputations and facts. Borges writes about despicable characters throughout world history whose common achievement is infamy itself. Tom Castro, for example, is the impostor who, after leaving prison, holds news conferences in which he either defends himself or confesses his guilt—according to the preferences of the audience. Such criminals are to be praised, suggests Borges, because they provide the dark and necessary occasion for an immortal undertaking—the telling of their story. The compadritos from Buenos Aires kill their adversaries and devote their old age to recounting that clean duel.¹²

Mexico’s infamy has been a domestic product for universal consumption. According to Carlos Monsiváis, crime news, the most popular journalistic genre of the twentieth century in Mexico, reproduced violence on a massive scale, highlighting the most barbaric aspects of the country’s culture and reinforcing images of Mexicans as a people inclined to commit violence for trivial reasons. Since the late nineteenth century, the enduring prints of calaveras by José Guadalupe Posada have provided an iconography for the idea. Reporter Pepe Nava put it plain words in a 1936 column in Excélsior: For the Mexican, death is a silly thing without importance. Here it is the same to kill as to be killed. Such images were also embraced by intellectuals looking for a definition of national identity, lo mexicano, during the middle decades of the century. Authors like Octavio Paz and Samuel Ramos saw violence and death as both the distinction and the burden of the nation. Crime stories portrayed an aspect of Mexican popular culture that, in their view, the nation had to transcend in order to become truly modern, like the United States.¹³

Infamy refers to both reputation and morality. The double meaning of the word is central to this book’s project: to understand the intersection of practices and perceptions that, in the eyes of the public, defined actions as criminal and punishment as just. Thus, this is a history, because its premise is that notions such as truth, justice, and even reality change over time; they are the product of debates where multiple social actors participate. This is a specifically a national history because, in contrast with Borges’s project, it focuses on the infamy of crime in Mexico, and in so doing, it tries to explain the infamy of Mexico, the reputation of the entire country. But from this historical perspective, the book criticizes the naturalization of crime implicit in that reputation. Unlike most national histories, therefore, it cannot offer a portrayal of the Mexicans or take the structure of a unified narrative. This book is instead a series of stories that include a diverse cast of actors and refer to both fiction and reality, just as in the book by Borges. This is not a book of fiction, of course, but a study of fiction’s role in creating an experience of reality as part of criminal literacy, that cautionary experience that people assemble to navigate everyday life. Although experience and stories are always local, the national scale is necessary in order to address the broader linkages between social practices, institutions, the press, and literature. Most of the evidence in the following chapters, therefore, comes from Mexico City because it was the place of famous criminal cases, the newspapers that covered them, and the legislators and policymakers who tried to deal with their consequences. Murder stories set in the capital played a central role in structuring criminal literacy across the country, without eliminating regional differences.

Historians have used famous cases as narrative references to delve into the microhistory of moments and places. There is nothing like a good criminal case to exemplify a historical circumstance, presenting the context and reproducing a diversity of voices while maintaining a suspenseful plot that is to be solved not necessarily through detection but by uncovering the broader historical meaning of the anecdote. The following chapters, however, stay away from that narrative structure. They do not use cases as metaphorical vehicles to make a point of more general significance. Instead, the book shows how each case, with its unique characteristics, shaped criminal literacy. Cases, therefore, are not examples but the very object of the knowledge that I am trying to reconstruct. In other words, I will not be the detective but will merely watch how others played the detective with the materials that life provided them.¹⁴

The following pages explore several arenas in which the public debated about the difficult connections among crime, truth, and justice. The chapters are organized into three parts that follow a loose chronological order. The first part of the book, Spaces, is concerned with the venues in which crime and justice were discussed. Jury trials, in chapter 1, provided the site for a multiplicity of actors to debate felonies and criminals. Trials in which regular citizens, rather than a judge, decided on the facts of the case were a novelty in the country’s legal history. In Mexico City, jury trials gave a prominent role to suspects and also created a setting in which other voices proposed alternative interpretations of events and motivations. Prosecutors and defenders gave long speeches, attacking or praising the character of victims, witnesses, and suspects. Participating in any of those capacities, suspects were exposed to the gaze of the public in ways that were unflattering yet also allowed some of them to challenge gender and class roles. Jurors themselves were involved, while judges tended to let everyone speak their minds and were not always able to prevent disorder. People attended jury trials in large numbers; they loudly voiced their opinions, often disrupting the proceedings. When juries were abolished in 1929, penal processes became increasingly opaque, playing out in small court offices and thick written files. It was then that the police news, or nota roja, the topic of chapter 2, took over as the realm where crime and justice were openly discussed. The transition from jury trials to the nota roja as the focal point of crime in the public sphere reflected the increasing alienation of Mexican citizens from the judicial system. Crime-centered newspapers and magazines contrasted their openness and dynamism with the obscurity of the courts. Newspaper readers believed that they had to search for the truth, and sometimes also for punishment, beyond state institutions. Just as the press was seen as a reliable source of facts, it was also an emotional vehicle to express support for punitive violence. Thus, newspapers were at the center of public debate about crime and fostered widespread support of extrajudicial violence against suspects. Columnists argued that since the death penalty could not be applied, and prison sentences were not long enough, infamous criminals should be punished with direct violence, including torture, lynching, or death at the hands of their guards—the so-called ley fuga.

The second part, Actors, focuses on the central characters of those discussions. Detectives and policemen, tackled in chapter 3, were supposed to establish the truth behind crimes and allow judges to impart justice. Yet they did not always succeed, or they succeeded using methods that undermined the public’s belief in their accounts, such as torture, extortion, and extrajudicial executions. Illegal violence was meted out by representatives of the government. The use of ley fuga occurred in a few exemplary cases as the culmination of a public debate, thereby enforcing the sentence of public opinion. Death was a fitting end for a parallel trial in the public sphere that, as everyone knew, was not as prone to corruption as those taking place within the judicial system. Thus, extrajudicial violence was a way to break the law in order to achieve justice. But it came at the cost of the dehumanization of its victims and only deepened the gap between truth and justice. Despite the glaring contradictions between these practices and liberal notions of justice, public opinion granted torture and ley fuga a veneer of coherence and legitimacy unavailable in official channels. Chapter 4 looks at murderers, and at murder as a communicative act—an action that always has public repercussions, usually visible in the press. Murderers, particularly when they had the attention of the media, used their crimes to convey a message, an explanation for their behavior, or just a story. Their narratives often challenged the legal truth: given the ineffectiveness of official procedures to clarify the facts, firsthand testimonies became essential even if they came from despicable characters, and confessions became the dominant evidence of the truth about a crime. Chapter 5 considers a very real stereotype, the pistolero, or gunman, an expression of the violence and impunity that most Mexicans associated with crime and politics during these decades. Pistoleros populated the gray zone between crime and justice and thrived on the support of their powerful employers, often politicians, particularly after the 1940s.

The third part of the book, Fictions, argues that literary narratives were integral to people’s understanding of the dilemmas of truth and justice, and that these narratives were a central vehicle for the formation of criminal literacy. Chapter 6 looks a the origins of the genre of crime fiction in Mexico and the emergence of readers and writers, and chapter 7 focuses on four authors and their efforts to reconcile art, crime, and justice. Science and legal thinking were only part of the broadly shared knowledge about criminals, police stations, courts, prisons, and the customs of the underworld. This knowledge was never presented in an encyclopedic format but was condensed in literary narratives that deployed imagination in the plot but realism in the details. Crime fiction was produced and consumed by all kinds of people who deemed it useful in everyday life. After all, any modern, resourceful, and literate inhabitant of the city had to possess some knowledge about these themes. As we will see in chapter 6, detective and murder stories were a popular literary genre that included both translations and original works by Mexican authors. In early Mexican narratives, as in American hard-boiled, the intuition of fictional detectives was seen as more reliable than the lies of evasive suspects—and certainly more persuasive than the stupid or, at best, dissembling methods of the police. Hard-boiled Mexican detective authors elaborated on the central role of crime news to reach the truth and on the aesthetic appreciation of homicide that newspapers only hinted at. In Rodolfo Usigli’s masterful 1944 novel Ensayo de un crimen, examined in chapter 7, Roberto de la Cruz, the main character, decides to commit a beautiful murder. He tries a couple of times and is frustrated when newspapers misinterpret his artistic work or attribute it to someone else. He wants to use murder to achieve a higher artistic truth but needs newspapers to publicize and validate it. As if to contrast reality with de la Cruz’s delusion, the novel itself often invoked criminal literacy, alluding to cases and practices familiar to knowledgeable readers. Other contemporaries tried variations on these situations. Chapter 7 shows how, as it matured, the genre began to neglect detection in its plots in favor of the perspective of criminals who deployed cruel forms of direct justice. These stories may have channeled the frustration of readers disappointed by the official justice system; in any case, they maintained the notion that punishment had a direct connection with the truth. In doing so, they expressed illiberal impulses inherent in the naturalization of violence and impunity. Following this insight, the epilogue tries to connect some of these themes with the present.

Other countries offer examples of the ways in which crime stories and stereotypes generated debates of great political consequence. There is plenty of evidence about the role of crime as the focus of civil society’s critical engagements with the state. In the words of Josefina Ludmer, crime is a critical instrument. The criminal, Karl Marx noted, is a producer of norms, knowledges and relationships.¹⁵ In the case of Mexico, as we will see, crime was a central theme for the emergence of critical publics—audiences which not only consumed information but also defined themselves by actively expressing their opinions. Mexico’s weak police and judicial system meant that civil society played a significant role in crime prevention, especially compared to countries where those institutions had greater strength and legitimacy. In Mexico, the smallest cases became politicized: Concepción Dueñas, a regular citizen, informed President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines in 1954 that the killer of her daughter was at large because the authorities do not pay attention to me and investigate as they should. She wanted justice, while investigators were satisfied with the idea that it had been a suicide.¹⁶ That kind of unmet demand for justice is a running theme in this book, always in tension with the immortal undertaking of remembering the criminal stories that came to define a national Mexican identity. Like Dueñas, the majority of the Mexicans cited in the following pages did not particularly relish living in a violent place, and they strenuously objected to impunity. Finding out the truth, and connecting truth to punishment, brought crime to the center of the public sphere.¹⁷

This was not a history of unanimity, however. Disregard for due process and general acceptance of violence were the paradoxical products of the civic engagement made necessary by the weakness of state justice. Nota roja and crime fiction produced narratives that were all the more convincing because they involved multiple voices challenging the state, not because they aped its rhetoric. The opinions expressed in those debates appealed to violence without undermining their rational authority. Not in spite of but because of its cacophonous combination of feelings, deduction, intuition, and random evidence, this version of justice in the public sphere could be brutal, but it at least claimed to have a strong link with the truth. It empowered some individuals to take justice into their own hands and in doing so legitimized collective prejudices.

Infamy touched both women and men. From the suspects and victims in jury trials to the writers and characters in crime fiction, gender inequality in terms of access to safety and justice defines the history contained in this book. These differences could be symbolic and material. Women were more often victims than perpetrators of violence, and victims of both sexes were expected to be passive and vulnerable regarding their dignity and bodies. At the same time, men had a near monopoly over the legitimate, if not legal, use of violence. They also excluded women from the key legal roles held by policemen, lawyers, juries, and judges. Crime challenged social norms, however, opening spaces for women to defy expectations, though often at the cost of their honor. Thus, crime reporting was a masculine job, but women also consumed and produced stories: readers included women, and famous cases often focused on women as victims or criminals. Criminal literacy helped the public make sense of a time of great changes in gender roles in Mexico, when urbanization, education, and democracy were making women more prominent at work and in public spaces, allowing them to gradually acquire political rights (the vote was only fully granted to them in the early 1950s). Yet the processes surveyed in this book cannot be summarized as a progressive transformation in terms of gender equality. If anything, stories about violence and punishment confirmed that women had a subordinated place in social life, however tantalizing the stories through which they challenged expectations.

Something similar can be said about class differences, which underwent decisive change during the middle decades of the twentieth century, paralleling changes in gender norms. The conflicts created by crime and efforts to restore order through investigations and the administration of justice brought people of different social classes into often uncomfortable proximity. Access to money and connections filtered most middle- and upper-class suspects out of the nightmare of prisons and police stations, but not all of them. Fewer still escaped the prying eye of police reporters and photographers. Crime stories offered readers a fascinating window into upper-class private spaces and the prestigious places where modernity seemed to reign, like fancy night clubs, restaurants, and even government offices. Illegality and violence forced intimacy on people who in normal circumstances would have remained safely isolated in their own social spaces by a deeply rooted notion of honor. Educated men monopolized the administration of justice, yet the pursuit of the truth opened up debates in the public sphere where participants could not be easily separated on the basis of their social standing.

This book encompasses two simultaneous trends. First, violence and impunity were normalized on the assumption that there would always be victims and suspects, and that their rights would always be limited. Gender and class divides expressed through crime were, in other words, the basis of authoritarian attitudes that tolerated inequality and the selective application of the law against a disenfranchised group of society. Second, public debates about crime and justice, although unresolved, expressed a common wish to find out what happened and to restore some balance to the lives disrupted by violence. This wish often entered into tension with assumptions about a fit between the roles created by crime and social difference. Restoring balance did not necessarily mean restoring hierarchies. The opposite of infamy, in sum, was not honor but the truth.

PART ONE

Spaces

ONE

From Transparency to Darkness

JUSTICE AND PUBLICITY IN THE MIRROR OF CRIMINAL JURIES

BETWEEN 1869 AND 1929, MEXICO’S capital housed the institution that best embodied the possibilities and limits of the pursuit of truth in crime: the jury system in penal courts. A group of randomly selected male city residents had the power to decide over the facts in felony cases. Attorneys and judges maintained a prominent role in the process, and the voices of witnesses and suspects were also heard during public audiences, but the decision about justice was ultimately in the hands of a few good men who, lacking any direct interest in the conflict at hand, voted with their conscience to represent public opinion. Despite constant criticisms from legal experts, the popular juries, as they were often called, worked with sufficient transparency and independence to achieve considerable authority. By the 1920s, the institution had reached the peak of its influence, but it was abolished in 1929 by a presidential decree that replaced the Federal District’s penal code. Criminal processes then followed an inquisitorial system, identical to the one already established in other jurisdictions, which kept most of the work of prosecutors and judges out of the public eye. The reasons for the abolition of the jury system, as we will see, were as much political as juridical. Starting in 1929, in any case, the penal process became completely opaque to common citizens.

During the 1920s, jury trials were prominent in the public sphere as the venue where diverse actors presented narratives and explanations of crime to broad audiences. Famous cases mobilized the rising power of newspapers and the radio. Those cases were particularly fascinating to the public because they exposed the subjectivity of those actors to the public’s probing scrutiny while simultaneously channeling criticism of the postrevolutionary regime.¹ Jury trials were the framework for influential debates about femininity, and they in turn contributed to the transformation of the role of women in public life—although, as we will see, not necessarily in a way that empowered them. Jury trials were a key site for constructing criminal literacy, and they catalyzed the emergence of publics that would tackle the problem of violence and impunity in subsequent decades. Studies of criminal juries in other countries stress their role as a space in the public sphere to explore many topics other than justice: emotions, gender roles, privacy, race. Jury trials did look like theater, and it is indeed tempting to see them as a stage where a variety of interesting plots and roles were performed as melodrama. Changing expectations about women in relation to violence and domesticity played out in this theater. In Mexico, however, jury trials were also the main stage for the pursuit of truth and justice. Multiple actors, from lawyers and suspects to audiences and journalists, participated in contentious debates, while jurors considered competing narratives.² State agents had only limited control over the process. The result was the emergence of an enduring skepticism toward the law. Looking at how jury trials operated beyond the structure of melodrama shows that women and political adversaries of the government could also use them to challenge their subordination.

After a brief history of the jury trial and its political context, this chapter will describe its operation through the testimonies of its defenders and adversaries. It would seem that nothing about jury trials was serene or balanced: the debates among lawyers about a particular case could be as acrimonious as the disputes on the way the institution worked. The basic question that divided those opinions was whether jurors were easily manipulated by base emotional appeals or hidden interests, or whether they were the custodians of a truly democratic institution. The second part of the chapter will deal with a famous case that marked the zenith of the jury trial’s influence in the public sphere, when in 1924 a girl was acquitted after murdering a politician. The third part will consider the fall of the institution, after the trial of the assassin of the president-elect in 1928, and a verdict that was reached in the context of political pressure, religious conflict, and the media’s obsessive interest. These two cases exemplify another lasting legacy of jury trials: the open vindication, by members of civil society, of informal justice and extrajudicial punishment as the best ways to deal with the limitations of the state.

HISTORY AND STRUCTURE

Established after half a century of civil war and foreign invasion following independence, jury trials promised an enlightened way to address the conflicts that still riddled the nation at every level of public and private life. Justice Minister Ignacio Mariscal and other liberals who proposed the institution identified it with democracy and progress and offered a prestigious genealogy: the jury was an invention of ancient Rome and Greece, perfected by the English people, codified by the French Revolution, and embraced by the United States.³ The Mexican 1856 Constitutional Congress, summoned by a liberal coalition, had debated the idea of including criminal juries in the new constitution, failing to approve it by only two votes. After the civil war with conservatives (1857–1861) and the French invasion in support of a monarchy (1861–1867), the same group of liberals returned to the idea. This time they established jury trials in the Federal District through a law that Mariscal proposed, Congress passed almost unanimously and President Benito Juárez signed in April 1869. As a space where the common citizens could, at least in theory, intervene directly in the process of justice, the popular jury, as it was often called, seemed to be a lively expression of popular sovereignty.⁴ There was a Mexican antecedent that Mariscal was reluctant to acknowledge. Journalists had been tried before juries from the 1820s until 1882, with some interruptions brought by political instability. In 1869, however, Mariscal was trying to avoid the impression that criminal juries would have the same flaws as press juries, which many saw as chaotic and biased in favor of suspects.⁵

Proponents of the jury believed that it could teach the public to tackle complex ethical and political situations while redeeming a justice system that lacked authority. Benjamin Constant, a strong influence on early Mexican liberals, argued that the jury was a mainstay of governance because it channeled private citizens’ concern about the law.⁶ The jury was valuable because it allowed ordinary citizens to not only enforce but also transcend the law, using their common sense to perform a basic function of public opinion in its classic role of judging reputations. Even though